As Art Basel Paris gathers the global art world under its glittering tent, the French capital hums with parallel energy. Beyond the fair’s commercial corridors, Paris’s museums are alive with major exhibitions that capture the city’s twin obsessions: memory and modernity. From the hypnotic canvases of Bridget Riley to the long-overdue recognition of Berthe Weill, this is a Paris Art Week built not merely on spectacle, but on conversation — between generations, continents, and ideas.

Here are five museum shows redefining the cultural pulse of the season.

1. Bridget Riley: A Dialogue with Seurat

Musée d’Orsay

Under the pale grandeur of the Musée d’Orsay’s glass vaults, the 94-year-old Bridget Riley presents a dazzling meditation on light, rhythm, and influence. This rare exhibition traces the genesis of her Op Art language back to a single moment in 1959, when Riley copied Georges Seurat’s Bridge at Courbevoie. What began as an exercise in pointillism evolved into a lifelong exploration of perception — transforming Seurat’s measured dots into pulsating waves of optical vibration.

In this show, Riley’s dynamic canvases — composed of precise geometric lines and radiant fields of color — converse across centuries with the Post-Impressionists. The setting could not be more fitting: Seurat’s scientific color theory meeting Riley’s sensual rigor beneath the museum’s iconic clock, both artists united by a desire to make light itself visible.

2. “Exposition Générale” — Fondation Cartier’s Grand Reopening

Fondation Cartier, designed by Jean Nouvel

Paris welcomes back Fondation Cartier with a spectacular new chapter. The celebrated institution, housed in Jean Nouvel’s shape-shifting architectural marvel opposite the Louvre, reopens with Exposition Générale — a sweeping exhibition of 600 works by more than 100 artists from its legendary collection.

Curated by Grazia Quaroni and Béatrice Grenier, the show spans media, continents, and decades: from Damien Hirst’s meditations on mortality to Joan Mitchell’s lyrical abstraction and Olga de Amaral’s tactile weavings. But the spirit of the building itself is redefined by Meriem Bennani’s audacious installation Sole Crushing, a kinetic sound symphony of 200 animated flip-flops. Their rhythmic clatter, re-scored by Cheb Runner, fills the building like a heartbeat — absurd, musical, and profoundly human.

Nouvel’s gleaming structure, ever-reflective and transparent, becomes both stage and instrument — a vessel for the living pulse of contemporary art.

3. Berthe Weill: The Dealer Who Made Modern Art

Musée de l’Orangerie

Few names have been as unjustly eclipsed as Berthe Weill — the pioneering Parisian gallerist who championed Picasso, Modigliani, and Matisse long before their fame was secure. The Musée de l’Orangerie’s landmark exhibition restores her legacy, charting the story of a woman who defied the male-dominated art market of the early 20th century.

Through archival materials, exhibition posters, and rediscovered works, Weill’s mantra — “Place aux jeunes” (“Make way for the young”) — comes alive again. Her support for women artists such as Suzanne Valadon and Émilie Charmy underscores her radical belief that art must renew itself through risk and youth.

In an art world still grappling with questions of visibility and gatekeeping, Weill’s defiance feels startlingly contemporary — her vision a mirror to our own debates on equity and recognition.

4. Thinking in Translation: French Philosophy and American Art

Palais de Tokyo

The Palais de Tokyo continues its reputation for intellectual depth with an exhibition curated by Naomi Beckwith, exploring how French post-war philosophy shaped the evolution of American art. Drawing on the revolutionary ideas of Foucault, Derrida, Beauvoir, and Fanon, the show creates a dialogue between conceptual pioneers and a new generation of thinkers.

Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cindy Sherman, Hans Haacke, and Pope.L are paired with new commissions from Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Cici Wu, forming a transatlantic chorus of critique and imagination.

More than a curatorial thesis, the exhibition feels like a philosophical séance — language and image exchanging breath, the body politic illuminated under the neon glow of theory.

5. Melvin Edwards: Chains and Liberation

Palais de Tokyo (solo retrospective)

Alongside Beckwith’s group show, Melvin Edwards receives his long-overdue first French retrospective. The American sculptor, known for his welded metal assemblages that confront histories of oppression and resilience, reclaims space within the heart of Europe’s avant-garde.

His Lynch Fragments series — compact, explosive sculptures of chain, hammer, and blade — merge abstraction with activism. In Edwards’s hands, iron becomes elegy, and form becomes resistance. Presented in dialogue with his peers and successors, his work resonates as both historical reckoning and contemporary urgency.

Paris as a Living Museum

This year’s Paris Art Week doesn’t merely showcase art — it stages a city-wide meditation on continuity and change. From the flickering light of Riley’s optical illusions to the ringing footsteps of Bennani’s flip-flops, from Weill’s forgotten courage to Edwards’s sculptural defiance, each exhibition reminds us that art in Paris is not static but breathing.

Paris, once again, becomes what it has always been: a mirror for the world’s creative conscience.